Firewatch Gameplay: Skinny Dipping and Book Stacking

Watching the talented team at Campo Santo take us through the unique gameplay of Firewatch has left us bewildered and surprised at what this lone forest ranger has to do in the vast Wyoming wilderness.

This developer walkthrough of Firewatch features Campo Santo's Chris Remo and Sean Vanaman demonstrating its intuitive gameplay. Remo is the game's composer, who also did the great soundtrack for Gone Home. Vanaman is one of the game's lead writers and designers, known for being one of the head writers for season one of Telltale's The Walking Dead.

The gameplay of Firewatch is rather simple, but quickly immerses you into this lonely forest ranger world. Your character's only companion is the female voice on the radio, who is miles away on the other side of the forest at the next station, and you've got protect miles of the woodlands. After witnessing some drunken college kids shoot off fireworks far in the distance, you find their unattended campfire still ablaze with a bottle of booze right next to it, which is a recipe for charred forest critters.

Once you stomp out the fire and steal the whiskey, you find a few bras on the ground, leading to a lake. The drunken criminals are actually college girls, skinny dipping. With their boombox ashore, you have the option to turn it off, yell at them or sneak up on them. The protagonist throws the boombox into the water, infuriating the swimmers. On the way back, your character is sidetracked by fixing the other things the girls did before they were swimming. Upon returning to his watch tower, the ranger finds his typewriter thrown out of his window, his home base vandalized and the sheets to his bed stolen. Mind you, he must live in the one-room watch tower, so with broken windows and no sheets, it's going to get awfully cold at night during his stay.

Firewatch is expected to launch on PC sometime in 2015. Based on the success of the PC version, we could possibly see a console version of this story-oriented game.